13
Who Do You Think You Are?
The Authorized Balinese
I first heard the story of the Nubian and the Roman circus under somewhat dubious circumstances, which need not detain us here, from a consultant of the British Transport Authority whose job it was to persuade the British public and politicians that increasing the size and number of juggernauts would be of great benefit to the environment. As it is a shaggy dog story, I give only the gist.
During the heyday of Roman circuses a group of mixed Christians was to be fed to the lions. As they were escorted in front of [he expectantly cheering crowd , a giant Nubian man gendy grouped his fellow believers together and told them to leave the lions to him . By various means the Nubian dispatched the first three males who attacked with great efficiency. Neither the audience, nor the Caesar, were pleased at this peremptory reversal of Iheir anticipated afternoon's entertainment. So the lions were caged , a troupe of gladiators sent in to seize, bind and bury the Nubian up to his neck in the sand. When the lions were released again it took some time before a cautious male stepped up to the immobilized Christian, sniffed him and decided it was safe to proceed to lunch. As he passed over the Nubian , however , the latter undeterred twisted his neck and bit off the animal's genitals. Upon which a voice from the crowd was heard to call out: 'Fight fair, you black bastard!' History does not relate subsequent events.
This party piece embodies themes which some anthropologists may find unsavoury, concerned as they maintain themselves to be with understand
ing and explaining people in other cultures to a more or less uninterested world. Behind this safe liberal attitude however, lurk more similarities with the Romans in the story than most care, or dare, to admit. Who, after all, represents these others? And on whose tenns are they , as a recent school of thought would have it, allowed their voices back ?
I n praise of pillage
'Quietness, grown sick of rest, would purge By any desperate change.'
(Anthony and Cleopatra I. iii) Anthropologists have a reputation as a predatory lineage. They are great colonizers: so we now have the anthropology-of-almost-anything from violence or evil to women, and doubtless soon premature balding. While
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The Authon"'l.ed Balinese 305 consists in the inscription of social action (strictly, 'our own constructions of other people's constructions'-Geertz 1973: 9). This is made possible by the 'fixing' of transient human discourse into autonomous text, detached from actual utterances and speakers' intentions. Culture therefore can, and should , be read like a text. A logical development is to submit ethnographies themselves to textual analysis which , as fate would have it, casts serious doubts on its original prophet's own pronouncements (see Clifford 1983:
132-33; Crapanzano 1986: 68-76). The textual critics also identify themselves with an assortment of 'post-structuralist' and effectively 'post
Marxist' French thinkers. Despite internal differences in stress, the latter are generally sceptical of the humanist focus on interpretation and meaning of the former. They presume distrust in the capacity of reason and language to reveal eternal, or even immediate, truths, preferring instead to stress the play of power in cultural discourse. Discourse on this reading is closer to the preconditions of action and speech, its historical context, than to the voices of human actors. There are important differences between the main protagonists (Hobart 1985). Whether attempting a synthesis and rendering allegiance both unto Caesar and unto God is sophisticated eclecticism or plain philosophical naivete, depends a bit on whether one takes the textu
alists' own view or that of their critics.
One of the textualists' main charges is that anthropologists (usually BritiSh) have been slow to appreciate that ethnographies do not simply capture and encapsulate facts. Some of the accused whom I know agree, others contend they have taken it into account from the first, others seem not to grasp what all the fuss is about. There is certainly a prima facie case for arguing that writing is not a neutral medium between reality and its representaJ.i.on, but a process with its own history and implications. Look
ing, for ins'fance, at textual traditions allows the exploration of such issues as how regional differences were construed, how they become perpetuated and affect the course of inquiry. What began as a useful corrective to a naive theory of representation (Clifford 1983) has come, however, to lay claim, in such works as Writing Culture,' to be a full-blown vision of anthropology as critical textuality, ethnography as polyphony, or culture as genre.
At this point the problems begin. While juicy images are eye-catching and suitably erudite sources-abstruse Polish logicians or obscure Elizabethans are to be recommended-<>ften secure professional preferment, ideas in
volve presuppositions and have implications beyond their immediate appli
cation. Although a critical reading of ethnography proposes a purgative of Western ethnocentrism , as a theoretical approach it easily becomes a glar
ing example of what it condemns, because it is riddled with its own cultural conceptions-hence the American and French Foucaults. Like SO much 'reftexive' thinking, what purports to be radical and emancipatory, on close scrutiny turns out to be unreftective, conservative, and subtly hegemonic.
It requires everyone to participate on its own tenns .
Such remarks about evidently well-meaning scholars need substantiation. In what follows I consider critically the implications of several linked, if not obvious, presuppositions of this textual criticism. These include such old stand-bys as a material metaphor of culture, the psychic unity of mankind,
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the metaphysics of presence and a correspondence theory of meaning, which may be explicitly eschewed but are unwittingly retained. These combine in a nai've theory of agency. (Crudely, culture is treated as the negotiated product of a dialogue between humans who share a common subjectivity expressed in different cultural styles but which is revealed by a sensitive reading of their authentic voices.) If this seems simplistic, it looks pretty polished compared to the better known anthropological accounts of South East Asia. Both though achieve a sort of hegemony by establishing the superiority of the knowing author over their objects of study and, recursively, reconstitute the peoples;n question and authorize them to exist and act in quite alien ways. Even the brief analysis ofone culture, Bali, with which I conclude, suggests the currency of ideas about identity and agency which are entirely precluded from recognition.
In short, although the new textual criticism is notionally concerned with how we distort the Other, it lands up indulging our seemingly endless passion with ourselves, our language, metaphors and intellectual spectacles, and oddly leaves other peoples even more remote than before. (Ironically, Foucault's suggestively impersonal epithet, 'the Other', has increasingly become an anthropological convenience for lumping the rest of the world together.) The concern with ethnography as knowledge overlooks the world of action and agents of which it is part. So, despite claiming to embrace the Other and liberate its polyphonic discourse, such approaches perpetuate the vision of the anthropologist as the superior 'knowing subject' who benefi
cently grants the Other its right to appear on its own behalf in the circus of contemporary academe. Unfortunately, like the Nubian, the Other has first been safely trussed up in relations of economic and political dependence , and firmly embedded in the sands of Western intellectual categories. So much is fairly familiar. The cruellest cut of all, however, is that the Other is only authorized to participate according to Western notions of self and action, and so is liable to be deemed not to be playing fair when it does not co-operate.
On authors and authorizing
'Is there no voice more wonhy than my own?'
(Julius Caesar iii, 1,49) How much weight can one give to a criticism, the intellectual founda
tions of which are rocky? The question arises because some textual criticism is quite apposite, even if the theory on which it claims to draw is confused and contradictory. For example, in his article 'On ethnographic authority' Clifford is illuminating on assumptions about authority and competence in ethnography by participant-observation (1983: 124-30), as is Crapanzano in questioning the authorial presence in Geertz's analysis (1972) of Balinese cockfights (1986: 68-75). The approach seems most effective when exploring the construction of authority and implicit forms of power (Asad 1986: Rabinow 1986) : and to become precious and derivative
The A utho,ized Balinese J{17
when it apes literary criticism. Perhaps part of its success as a critique is that it shares much common ground with what it engages. However, the price of such self-reflective criticism, besides being infinitely regressive, is that it privileges the anthropologist and Western academic cultures at the expense of the supposed subject.
To elucidate these remarks, certain points are worth noting in Clifford's article and in various contributions to Writing Culture. Clifford imagines a post-critical 'generalized ethnography' which is suited to an 'ambiguous, multi-vocal world' (1983: 119). The key problem is 'how is unruly experi
ence transformed into an authoritative written account . . . composed by an individual author?' (1983: 120) . Clifford reasonably notes, how
everI that,
it is difficult to say very much about experience . .. if only because appeals to experience often act as validations for ethnographic authority . . . . But this experiential world. an intersubjective ground for objective fonns of knowledge. is precisely what is missing or problematic for an ethnographer entering an alien culture .
(1983: 128) It becomes necessary [0 conceive ethnography, not as the experience and interpretation of a circumscribed 'other' reality, but rather as a constructive negotiation involving at least two, and usually more, conscious, politically significant subjects. Paradigms of experience and interpretation are yielding to paradigms of discourse, of dialogue and polyphony.
(1983 : 133) As far as they go, Clifford's criticisms are pertinent but are they as radical as is claimed?
In spite of the brave attempt, Clifford's own text holds him back.
Ethnographies are implicitly divided into genres; and their subject matter is assumed to be homogeneous. (J ncidentally, if ethnographies are complex and heterogeneous how would we establish that new ones would produce a truer account than existing ones?) Although Clifford briefly raises the question of the authorship of field notes and the role of the reader in realizing there to be more than the 'text's dominant voice' (1983: 136, 141), he proceeds most of the time as if the text were a unitary object and the sole agent of the monograph the anthropologist. As a result he embraces an antediluvian model of agency which excludes the complex relations of which a work and its formal author are only part (see Burghart in this volume). 'Text' tends to be treated in a positivist manner as synony
mous with the actual work (cf. Barthes 1979). This leads to him ignoring the difficult questions of how , and how far, such mutual knowledge comes about and of what it would consist. Interaction is assumed, teleolOgically, to be constructive (not, say, destructive, complex or under-determined) and to lead to shared communication, despite the case for coexistence effectively depending on substantial misunderstanding (Wallace 1961 : 29-44) and the serious problems of how 10 infer a conceptual scheme from action at all (Quine 1960: 26-79).
Clifford's vision of anthropology as capturing the real polyphony of life leans heavily on Bakhtin's notion of 'heteroglossia' which is read not as
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language or some suitably cautious expression, but as 'voice', which brings to mind Derrida's point that voice implies the intimate and immediate pres
ence of experience and subjectiviry. Despite the supposed transition from experience to discourse, the theme of voices reappears continuaUy in the images of dialogue and polyphony. Voice somehow captures the realiry of personal experience. Fieldwork , we are told, rests on inter-subjectiviry but this simply begs the question of personal identity and shared subjectiviry in the first place. In other words, we seem to be faced with a very old fashioned idea of the self, not just as the sole kind of agent, but as an autonomous, 'knowing subject' in Foucault's sardonic phrase. This suspicion is borne out by the depiction of ethnography as a negotiation between conscious subjects which conjures up all sorts of utilitarian ghosts. Negotiation pre
supposes not only an account qf intention , interests and self but also, as Durkheim observed long ago, a culturally variable language in which it is conducted (Hobart 1986) . After all this has been imposed on the unfortu
nate Other-at once generalized in Its spurious specificiry and revocalized by superior agency-it is naive at best to inform them or the reader that they are now politically significant subjects.
The textualists' own text tells us much more though. In the Introduction to Writing culture, the essays, we are told (paraphrasing Geertz 1973: 15) focus on 'the constructed, artificial nature' of 'text making'. For ethnogra
phy 'is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of culture'. It is 'situated between powerful systems of meaning', 'at the boundaries of civilizations, cultures, classes', and so on. So the essays 'reach beyond texts to contexts of power, resistance, institutional constraint' (Clifford 1986a:
2) within which anthropological ideas are 'enmeshed' (1986a: 11) by 'stag
ing dialogues' (1986a : 14) to reach the 'polyphony' of 'negotiated realities' whereby the falsiry of 'monophonic authoriry' is 'revealed' (1986a: 15).
Such 'post-modernism' is distinct in 'demanding new forms of inventiveness and subtlery' (1986a: 22-23), where 'divergent styles of writing are . . . grappling with these new orders of complexity' (1986a: 13).
The metaphors are striking. Texts are things made , as cultures are invented, by anthropologists. Power is conceived as force working against resistances and constraints. Meaning and culture, indeed knowledge itself, are bounded, concrete entities. The moving spirit in this solidified world is Mind through the instrument of language. Culture is revealed through language as authentic voices. As Clifford's allegories, more constitutive than deconstructive, run amuck he is left with a serious problem of agency .' On the one hand, ethnography depends on the genius of the ethnogra
pher-better still the textualist who explains to him what he said-and realiry on the negotiating skill of the 'knowing subject' (shades of Utilitari
anism's soft side-kick, Symbolic Interactionism). On the other, transeen
dental agents take over as 'post-modernism demands' and 'sryles of writing grapple'.
The promised post-modem revolution, overshadowed by the past, pales into an abortive rebellion. Perhaps we learn a bit about Clifford and his entourage but precious little about people in other cultures. Inspection sug
gests that this exclusion is built into the approach. For the knowable world
TheAuthorized Balinese 309
is to be reached through contemporary Western categories, like allegory, genre and meaning, which hold good across cultures and historical periods.
Otherwise Clifford would be obliged to consider both how ethnographers interpret informants and how he interprets their texts. J Inter-subjective experience conveniently rides to the rescue. For 'individuals collaborate to produce a specific domain of truth' (1986b: 104). Unfortunately the subjec
tivity looks uncomfortably like Clifford's own writ large,' The author of the ethnographic text has become still less a partial instrument than the agent who enables people in other cultures to speak and-the more the text assumes immediacy instead of the fieldwork-in a sense to exist. Paradoxi
cally, purging the author's bias has culminated in the ethnographer being left to authorize and perpetuate the Other. Ethnography becomes the poisoned chalice of an elixir of immortaliry.
The theoretical pretensions of the approach are perhaps best brought out by two other contributors. Tyler, with great aplomb, undertakes to tell us what post-modem ethnography should look like, blithely lumping anyone in sight under that label (1986: 125) from Lyotard to Habermas despite the latter's strenuous denials (1985). Previous scholars 'have missed the true import of Hdiscourse", which is '4the other as us". for the point of discourse is not how to make a better representation, but how to avoid representation' (1986: 128). Oh, good! Behind all the talk of polyphony, pluralism and so on, there is a true view and the textualists, or at least Tyler, have it. (If discourse has a true import , Tyler is backing the wrong horse in embracing post-modernism which is usually associated with aiming to challenge the possibility of such true knowledge.) The Other has now been absorbed into the superior language of the ethnographer (a danger of which Asad warned, 1986: 156-60), made safe for democracy and, further, has become con
flated with the self-centred and total ego of the anthropologist.
Tyler sets out to undermine the delightfully simple-minded view that 'the ethnographic text' represents reality . Meaning is to be found, not in representation, but instead in evocation (note once again the appeal to primal 'voice') which frees ethnography from 'mimesis', objects, facts, descriptions , and SO on (1986 : 130). Apart from pre-empting inquiry into indigenous notions and usage of reference (on which Balinese for instance are rather subtle), Tyler is flogging the long-dead horse of crude Correspondence Theory seemingly unaware that the argument passed him by some time ago (on his own countrymen alone, see Davidson 1973 ; Goodman 1981; Quine 1953, 1960) . The idea that the sole, let alone sim
ple, function of language is to represent things is largely restricted, among the thinking classes, to die-hard Logical Positivists and Dan Sperber who, incidentally, took the same tack with evocation slightly less unsuccessfully (1975: 115-23). Goodman, for instance, pointed out that, even were we to try , we simply cannOI represent things as they are, rather we represent something as something else (1981 : 3-43; to which I would add 'to an audience on a particular occasion'). And Jakobson alone noted at least six non-exclusive functions of language (1960). Instead of meditating on 'the true import of discourse', perhaps we might ask how language is used by people in doing things in particular historical and cultural situations.
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'For learned nonsense has a deeper sound Than easy sense, and goes for more profound .'
(Samuel Butler, 'Upon the abuse of human learning') To the extent that Tyler is coherent, he unwittingly embraces most of the presuppositions behind the arguments he attacks. Why, for instance, should culture be about meaning? And why should we be offered a dichotomous choice between ethnography either evoking Or representing in the first place? The answers open a can of wonns. He assumes essential processes of understanding which constitute exclusive, indeed dichotomous, classes.' DOing away with representing would not dispose of the ontological problem of what it is that whoever it is js doing to what. One evokes something, however conceived, unle.s we are to imagine pure undirected eVOking, like pure emoting. (Would Tyler wish to argue that his critique of representa
tion is itself purely evocative ?) In all this, the nature of the evoking self is treated as curiously unproblematic. Instead we are offered the Western mind reflecting on itself and its creations: 'post-modern ethnography is an Object of meditation' (1986 : 134). These are not quibbles because they point to confusions in the critical textual project quite beside the rampant essentialism, ontological myopia and assured egotism which the reader has, mercifully briefly, encountered above .
The world Tyler is trying to enter has already been depicted by Baud
rillard . It is a world of simulacra created by the knowing subject who in turn becomes a simulation. Simulation, unlike representation, starts 'from the radical negation of the sign as value' (1983a: 11). If one follows this path, the image goes through successive phases:
-it is the reflection of a basic reality -it masks and perverts a basic reality -it masks the absence of a basic reality -it bears no relation to any reality
whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum . ... When the real is no longer what it used to be. nostalgia assumes its fuO meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality: of second-hand truth, objectivity and authentic
ity . There is an escalation of the true. of the lived. experience; a resurrection of the figura[ive where [he object and substance have disappeared .
(1983a: 11-12) Baudrillard has not just anticipated the cui-d.-sac into which Tyler, Clifford and Co. so gaily gallop, he offers a delightful caricature of the plight of such an anthropology which has to reinvent the Other ('Savages who are endebted to ethnology for still being Savages', 1983a : 15). For
the logical evolution of a science is to distance itself ever further from its object until it dispenses with it entirely,
(1983a : 14)' Whatever the aim, the effect is to write off other peoples, or only to allow them in by way of the superior language and knowledge of anthro
pologists. That people might 'scandalously resist this imperative of rational
The AUlhorized Balinese 311
communication' in favour of spectacle, the play of signs or stereotypes (Baudrillard 1983b: 10), or whatever it might be, seems not to have dawned. The critical textualist venture is ultimately, in the phrase of that philosophe manque Anton Froge (1873: 37), 'autocephalopederastic'.
Tyler's colleague Fischer conveniently brings up the rear. He recom
mends us to ethnic autobiography with its 'insistence on a pluralist, multi
dimensional, or multi-faceted concept of self' (1986: 196) . At first sight, one is tempted to endorse such an aim, but this amiable liberalism is not quite what it seems. Ethnic autobiography will reveal the concept of the self. Now, is the self a concept? And whose concept of self is it anyway ? The project makes sense only if the self in different contexts, classes and cultures is effectively commensurable and translatable. For this to be so the self (once again species as genus) must be essentialized out of its historic and cultural situations. Rellexivity here presupposes people are basically separated from their thoughts and actions. In assuming that the self is something on which it is culturally appropriate, and semantically possible, to wax lyric. Fischer is prescribing an ethnocentric cultural vision and the kind of hegemonic discourse he claims to reject. If Clifford is Brutus to a Geertzian Caesar's textual tyranny, Tyler and Fischer are his Cassiuses.
Here we come to the nub. For this discourse consists of 'compulsions', 'repressions' and the like which, when stripped away or resolved, lead to the 'revelation of cultural artifice' (1986: 231). We are back to an antic theory of individual and society in which the knowing subject at best attains his or her true individuality by shaking off the artificial shackles of culture.
and at worst achieves a measure of emancipation by rellecting on its con
ditions of enslavement. When Fischer urges 'the reader to self-consciously participate in the production of meaning' (1986: 232). meanings and producers are assumed to be at least partly commensurable. and self
consciousness to be the criterion of true knowledge and personhood. The whole enterprise is underwritten by an amaurotic vision of a psychic unity of mankind which, On inspection. turns out to be that of a middle-class American academic.' Perhaps the reader may now grant that the image of the trussed-up native in someone else's spectacles is not so far from the mark .
Critical textualists then run the risk of uncritically exemplifying many of the presuppositions they profess to purge. Whatever the trendy, iII
understood vocabulary, the approach is deeply conservative and, like so much epistemology, loftily ignores its own political implications. Anthro
pology is a convenient bolt-hole for those of timid liberal and pluralist persuasion who. after the event. can safely rail at colonial injustices-
but manage to be SOlO voce about its equally otiose successor 'develop
ment'. (One wonders. no doubt unfairly. whether textualism is not some
times a useful let-out from all the rigours. untidiness and imperfection of fieldwork .) The loyal opposition may help what it claims to oppose.
Certain brands of reftexive anthropology-in recreating other peoples, in authorizing their otherness, while empowering them only to exist in terms of their authors' sense of self-seem to me subtly to perpetuate unacceptable
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fonns of domination by underwriting the conditions which made this poss
ible. We are invited to witness a conspiracy against oppression but are left with Neros fiddling while Rome bums.
Hegemony and cryogeny
Steering clear of the Charybdis of a regressive reflexivity is no excuse for leaping back into the gorges of the Scylla of naive realism. A study of regional traditions of ethnographic writing may promise an escape from ethnocentric generalization and enable one in theory to stand back and look at the circumstances in which certain ideas come to be accepted as typifying a particular area of the world (see Strathem in this volume). There are two difficulties however. The first is a trap to which textualism is also prey. It may crudely be epitomized by the question of how much perceived variation is due to the emergence of a specific textual tradition and how much to real differences between regions? The second is whether one can trace an emergent tradition without constructing a genealogy which represents sectarian interests at the expense of views of people in other societies, subjects or schools. Focusing on the fanner obscures the ways in which commentary necessarily involves relations of power as much as does ethnographic writing.
My objection is that to see ethnography in terms of an allelomorphic dichotomy of reality and textually-informed knowing subject is misguided. It rests on a dubious, and highly essentialized, vision of reality, knowledge and agency. In its baldest version it assumes a naive realism (facts are given), linked to a passive theory of knowledge based on a visual metaphor (truth will be perceived when distortions are removed, ct. Rorty 1980 : 3-45). The facts and values of a culture, however heterogeneous and changing, are ultimately given. The problem becomes how best to cope with the distortions inevitably imposed by ethnography, whether these be inadequacies of circumstances, method, personality, intellectual or textual tradition, and so On. Reflexivity just adds to the burden of anthropologist as hero. The antithetical view, sometimes labelled idealist, that humans invent culture (Wagner 1981 ; and that ethnography is therefore construc
tions of constructions) only shifts the emphasis from the world 'out there' to the world 'in there' of the knowing subject. Juggling both views at once, whether by asserting both naturalism and cultural variability (Bloch 1977;
Horton 1979), different perspectives on a single reality (Lukes 1982), or reality as negotiated between self-conscious subjects, merely compounds the confusion. In neither version is the nature of the reality or the problems in knowing considered seriously: the anthropologist is the agent, or instrument, of ethnography and the people at best the instruments, more often the patients, of his or her knowledge (see Crapanzano's comments on Geertz's Deep play, 1986: 70-76). Cultures emerge as separate entities, be these conceived in material. social or discursive terms, the relations between which may be phrased in terms of appropriating knowledge or of translation and interpretation. This vision is flawed, I submit, not only
The AUThorized Balinese 313
because it assumeS a hierarchical relationship between ethnographers and ethnographed , but because it helps to bring such a situation about in fact and perpetuate the condition it assumes. In other words, texts become hegemonic and_ what I shall call, cryogenic.
Approaches which leave reality and knowledge, history and culture in limbo. and treat issues of agency as unproblematic, are seriously at fault.
For a start, they ignore the entire human history of contact, trade.
domination and attempted subjugation or extinction , of which authoriza
tion, and more recently ethnography, is but one facet. Peoples have been busy beating up, exploiting, ogling, ignoring and misunderstanding one another for a long time . Ethnography is a newcomer to a world of complex and confused past dialectical relationships. The facts reported by ethnogra
phers do not exist in vacuo but are continually being reworked by agents, including ethnographers themselves, in particular cultural and historical situations. Knowledge, including that pernicious thing the ethnographer's self-consciousness. is not a passive process of realizing what is already there, but again a continued re-working on different occasions (even if academics sometimes have to run fast to stand still). In other words, the reality and the textual traditions which notionally might determine the 'content' of ethnog
raphy are themselves the results of previous (and, more often than is usually allowed . mutual but not necessarily mutually comprehensible) acts, as is the knowledge and consciousness of both ethnographers and their subjects.
Inden, writing about Orientalism, has raised a point which applies with equal force to anthropologists. For Western knowledge
is privileged in relation to that of the Orientals and it invariably places itself in a relationship of intellectual dominance over that of the easterners. It has appropriated the power to represent the Oriental. to trans late and explain his (and her) thoughts and acts not only to Europeans and Americans but a/so to the Orientals themselves. But that is not all. Once his special knowl
edge enabled the Orientalist and his countrymen to gain trade concessions.
conquer , colonize. rule . and punish in the East. Now it authorizes the area studies specialist and his colleagues in government to aid and advise, develop and modernize. arm and stabilize the countries of the so-called Third World. I n many respects the intellectual activities ofthe Orienta/ist have even produced
. the very Orient which it constructed in its discourse.
(Inden 1986: 408; my emphases)' I would merely add that imposing our ideas of knowledge, self and reality are the more insidious, the more carefully they are wrapped up in libertarian pretensions.
Against this background, textual criticism, regional or otherwise, attains a new significance. Although anthropologists spend much time writing about how genealogies underwrite claims to truth and power, they seem less sensitive, publicly at least, to their own efforts to do the same.' One could, for instance. write several different accounts of the growth of knowl
edge about Indonesia. each perhaps illuminating in its own way but which rightly would give rise to complaints of skew, of re-presentation . (f there is nO neutral way to talk about the seminal works of an intellectual tradition which is not itself part of a political history, we are pitched into questions
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of agency in the relationship of subjects, authors, texts and readers. What is seminal depends partly on what it spawns. So, rather than just add another premature contribution , it maybe worth briefly considering how some of the best known approaches to South East Asia depict their subjects, how far certain works attain the curious status of being definitive and how a textual tradition may become an agent in constituting ethnographic reality.
The question of how South East Asia has been represented by the West would, and indeed already has, taken up several books (on recent anthropological work on Indonesia alone see Boon 1977, 1982; de Josselin de Jong 1983a, 1984; Koentjaraningrat, 1975; on how this has affected, or been used by, the peoples concerned, see the contributions to Hobart and Taylor 1986). As anthropologists are relative innocents in a field well worked over by archaeologists, historians and orientalists, the arguments over the nature and implications of a specifically South East Asian textual tradition, were it desirable, would be a substantial undertaking well beyond the scope of this paper. So instead I shall consider briefly whether there are (as Inden has argued for India, forthcoming) what might be regarded with hindsight as hegemonic texts which have established the terms of future discussion and which have, in a sense , helped to constitute South East Asian societies. While future research will, no doubt, reveal more influential sources (Conrad's novels?), for anthropological purposes I shall suggest there is a fascinating cryogenic trend which serves, accidentally or deliberately, to freeze South East Asian societies from changes which are depicted as modem and external.
The way in which Western discourses affect their 'objects' is apparent in the notion of South East Asia itself. The term is a convenience born in the aftermath of the Second World War to cover the area including Thailand (then Siam) and the colonies of Dutch Indonesia, the Hispano-American Philippines, British Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Sabah, Brunei, the White Rajas' Sarawak, and French Indo-China. Subsequently it has served various parties' interests, not least those of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations), at times to represent themselves as having something in common. While historians have traced genealogies of kingship (from Java to Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, although not under those names) within the region, in broader terms South East Asian societies have usually been regarded as peripheral to the twO Great Civilizations of India and China , as the composites Indo-China and Indonesia suggest. Their political marginality was long under-written by archaeological, historical and cultural evidence which portrayed local societies as passive recipients of apot-pourri of civilizing influences from their great neighbours which in turn were degenerate or stagnant dead ends in the evolution of civilization. Where one digs, and so what one finds, depends of course partly on what one is looking for. Despite this, recently the tables have turned , and archaeological and linguistic evidence is adduced in favour of South East Asia as the originary site of settlement, domestication of rice and other good things which are exported. No doubt matters will change again. ,.
Whereas India and China seem to have been represented as, relatively speaking, unified, centralized and organized, the region in between was
,...
The Authorized Balinese 315 portrayed as diversified, largely decentralized and disorganized. As Boon has pointed out (1986), the British colonial authors on Sumatera, Java and Bali alone (Marsden 1811; Raffles 1817; Crawfurd 1820) described. and in
deed commended, these three adjaoent islands as potential models. as 'con
troll able', 'monumental' and 'Kawified' (literally, Indianized) respectively.
Another way this diversity is expressed is in an opposition between the cen
tralized (Hindu-Buddhist) states of Java and Bali on the one hand and the local rulers (often mercantile Muslim) of small lowland areas and acepha
lous swidden societies ofthe 'Outer Islands' on the other (a dichotomy given geographical flesh by Geertz 1963a)." Whether the former constituted far-flung empires or barely controlled the perimeters of their own capitals, depends on one's prior assumptions; as does whether the sources upon which rival interpretations are based are considered historical chronicles or not (e.g. Pigeaud 1960-63; cf. Berg 1965). Even the adherents of a vision of dynastic splendour firmly place this in a long-lost past. So the purported subsequent disorganization and squalor make the past. and the necessity of a European managerial presence, appear desirable by contrast.
Reflexive approaches tend to stresS the degree to which the meaning of a text is determined by the social and personal circumstances of the author.
One might equally argue that such texts are important for the courses of action they anticipate.
The themes of diversity and disorganization spread well beyond Indon
esia. An example is Embree's famous characterization of Thai society (maybe by contrast to Japan where he worked before) as 'a loosely struc
tured social system'. Here we learn that the Thai are 'individualistic' to the point of an 'almost determined lack of regularity, discipline and regulation' (1950: 182) , in which 'obligations are not allowed to burden one unduly' (1950: 184). This extreme individualism leads to 'permissiveness' which celebrates 'enjoyment not hard work ' and indeed 'to tell a lie successfully , to dupe someone else, is praiseworthy in Thai culture' (1950: 191,190,186).
Similar themes permeate Leach's Political systems of Highland Burma (al
though I hardly think either would generally be considered to have wielded a hegemonic influence over subsequent regional ethnography). Highland Burma certainly exemplifies several common trends in the literature. The. Kachin are incapable of efficient central organization and attempts invari
ably collapse." And their appearance of stability or continuity is ritual or symbolic (see Gellner's critique, 1973). The extent of local variation invites recourse to a conjectural history of plural influences. So, what is culturally worthwhile is presumed to be largely borrowed or imported from outside (via the conveniently little-studied Shan from the Indian Great Tradition) and mechanically, if ineptly, imitated. Recognition of such promiscuity poses a threat however to determinate theories of social structure or culture. So a theory of human nature must be invoked to explain the resultant problematic relationship between individual behaviour and social rules or nonns. For the Kachin it is '3 conscious or unconscious wish to gain power' (1954: 10)." Where Leach and Embree disagree is over whether their respective peoples are driven by a desire to maximize their power or to indulge their desire for leisure and egoistiC autonomy.
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How emergent academic traditions may directly affect their object of study is strikingly evident in the Netherlands. This was realized in the emergence of the University of Leiden as the centre for both Indonesian studies and for training colonial civil servants: scholars and administrators were often the same people in different stages. or aspects. of their lives (for details. see Koentjaraningrat's nice analysis. 1975). The potential overlap of interests is evident in the stress on adatrecht. Indonesian customary law . which elided inquiry into collective representations and the perceived needs of government. whether explicitly interventionist or not. Adatrecht was an extraordinary hybrid. not least because adat is an Arabic word (I ndonesians had to borrow. via Islam. the term by which their cultures were to be epitomized). It required the conjunction between law. broadly conceived, and supposedly general indigenous ideas of a pervasive cosmic harmony. So not only was inquiry into the nature of social processes effectively pre-empted both by the assumptions of the model and the developing dogma that Indonesia, beneath the differences. was a culture area (some of the earlier writings especially include glorious exceptions).
but the reified structures came to be upheld by law and celebrated as distinctly Indonesian. In Bali for instance, apart from transmogrifying intricate networks of ties between princes. overseers and peasants into administrative villages or irrigation complexes, subtle regional differences in understanding of economic and pOlitical clientage and ranking became rigidified into monolithic systems of land tenure and caste. The twist in the tale is that adat is recognized in Indonesian law. SO culture reconstituted is now official.
While mainland South East Asia tended to be conceived in terms of Grand Systems (usually Hinayana Buddhist) imitated by marginal minor
ities and maritime South East Asia, a field unified in its diversity. two popular anthropological approaches to Indonesia reiterate presuppositions similar to those noted above. The first is the Leiden, and sometime Oxford, tradition of structuralism , which was dominant for a long time in the Neth
erlands (and, as its proponents will soon tell one, predates Levi-Strauss, although it is distinguished by a greater focus on the empirical study of surface structures). The second is associated with the writings of Clifford Geertz. The former, under the guiding hand of the de Josselin de Jong lineage, constitutes an exclusive genealogy;" the latter reflects the prolix hermeneutic imagination of Clifford Geertz who. as it happens, is also the moribund father of the Oedipal textual analysts. Despite differences (see Geertz 1961), the two have more in common than either would allow. For example, Geertz in his analysis of the Balinese theatre state (1980) rediscov
ers-for he does not cite-van Wouden's Eastern Indonesian Divine King who is trapped by the passivity which underwrites his legitimacy (1935) . The similarities extend not only to their predominant concern with symbolic structures but even to their vision of human nature.
At the risk of simplifying. to the Leiden School social structure in Indonesia is symbolic (hence the fragility of immanent organizations)."
the endless borrowings and contingent features are structured according to a general cultural template (which unfortunately has many different forms
The AUlhori1.ed Balinese 317
or emphases) at a level of abstraction such that it determines conceptual structures without having to explain, or even consider, divergences in actual behaviour. From its inception the Leiden School was heavily indebted to Durkheim (see de Josselin de Jong 1983b) and drew implicitly on his theory of human nature as mechanically reflecting collective representations, a position which they did not have to modify as much as all that when they decided to claim. in varying degree. Levi-Strauss as a collateral.
Although Geertz has written about both Java and Bali. there are certain continuities behind the contrasts. If'traditional institutions' still work in Bali (1959a: 34). Java is perilously unstructured and disorganized. The imposi
tion of foreign ideas and institutions. mainly through Dutch economic and administrative policies (1963a), have reduced villages to amorphous suburbs (ef. Jay 1969; Koentjaraningrat 1985 : 99-229)." while the burgeoning towns are at once shakily held together and divided by allegiance to different status groups. reincarnate as rival political parties (Geertz 1957, 1965). The implication that things were in some kind of balance before the Dutch made it all go wrong not only fits ill with historians' portrayals of widespread strife and confusion (e.g. Ricklefs 1978), but also. dichotomously, equates corporate groups and formal organization with structure and their absence with chaos. The assumptions are illustrated by the problem the Javanese have had, according to Geertz, in achieving 'economic take-off' (i963b).
By under-playing the degree to which Java was integrated into the Dutch economy and the subsequent strangle-hold of the Chinese on commercial capital, the impression is created of the Javanese as rude dolts, clowning their superiors but largely failing to grasp even the rudiments of modem business. rather than as the rural sector of a complex industrialized. and partly international , economy trying to gain entry into fiercely defended monopolies (ef. Dewey's subtler account. 1962).
Geertz traces the complexity and internal political instability of Java to the co-existence of three ideal typical status groups which provided the nuclei of social structure (1960: 5). Of these, the Santri (Muslim) and Priyayi (Hindu-Buddhist) models have been imported and coexist more or less easily with an indigenous Abangan tradition. which looks like the Little Tradition aping its Hindu elders and betters. Although he recognizes the significance of cultural borrowing, Geertz has had at times to engage in quite fancy footwork to dissociate Java and Bali from India. His theory of human nature requires it. For humans are essentially (sic) driven by the need to understand and make meaningful the world in which they live. They do so, however. in a curiously passive-indeed Durkheimian-way. Whether he is writing about religion in Java or the Balinese state, a description of col
lective representations is implicitly regarded as the necessary and sufficient explanation of human actions. While. as Crapanzano has pointed out. the anthropologist is equipped, actively to search out and expand his world view and human understanding, the unfortunate natives of the East Indies must wait and suffer little meanings to come unto them. A dialectical theory of action would ill fit such a view.
Geertz's work on Bali. by contrast. is predominantly concerned with exploring symbolism. SO reiterating the academic folklore which depicts
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Java as the economic and political hub of Indonesia, and Bali as quaint and unlikely. (Perhaps because of its proximity and historical links, in some unstated manner Bali is paradoxically made to exemplify at once the idyllic beauty and Otherness of pre-conquest Java, and its potential violence and instability.) In a well-known article directly addressed to the problem of variation, Geertz seeks to explain variation in terms of a kaleidoscopic model of village institutions or 'planes of social organization', which may be mixed in different combinations like playing cards (1959b:
991-92). (Later, he gives more stress to the dynamic implications of differences in styles of life between aristocrats and commoners, e.g. 1980.) The possibility of endogenous progressive change is effectively ruled out ab initio because these planes are 'fixed and invariant' (Geertz 1959b: 991).
Geertz does not, however, clarify a significant ontological confusion over whether planes of organization are indigenous or analyst's constructs. The former reading would be in keeping with his general concern with local conceptual systems," but this would leave the unfortunate Balinese trapped inside a static conceptual model and seemingly unable to do much about changes in the world. (Two years earlier-in 1957-Geertz had proposed that the instabilities of Java were due to 'culture' lagging behind changes in 'structure' .) Organizational deficiencies in Bali are due to the system still working through traditional ties to achieve traditional goals (1963b).
so external influences. for example national politics, are disruptive. Like giving a child a machine gun, they are excessively powerful tools with which to pursue petty local rivalries, as they are in the hands of people who are not yet equipped to handle them (1959a).
In the vast literature on Bali a trend, so far more or less implicit, emerges clearly which one might label that of 'the cryogenic text'. In 1925 Korn, one of the great Dutch scholars on Bali, for instance, wrote an article appositely in the Koloniaal Tijdschrift (Colonial Journal) with the arresting title' Bali is apart . .. is fijner bezenuwd dan eenig onder deel van lndie' ('Bali is a thing apart, [it] is more delicately strung than any other part of the Indies'). This was in fact only one in a long series of curious representations of the island which, as Boon has argued (1977:
10-89), stretches back to Camelis de Houtman's retrospectively famous stop there in 1597. It continues in ever more numerous projects to 'rescue' Balinese culture-and sometimes the Balinese-from the depredations of tourists, Western economic and Indonesian political influences, if not from the Balinese themselves. which have been generated by the same vision of the Other as has the mission to save it '" Significantly, the imagery in which would-be, and self-appointed , saviours of Balinese culture depict its plight are invariably Western. Bali is a young virgin whom over-use will soon render an old whore ; Bali used to be a healthy body which is now falling prey to (variously pictured) diseases; Bali is feeble, passive Asia, unable to help itself, and must be rescued from the virile, adive West by virile, active Westerners.
Although Bali may be a rather dramatic example, it introduces the broader theme of the extent to which anthropology requires the death of its object of study to exist as a subject.
The Authorized Balinese 319 For ethnography to live , its object must die. But the latter revenges itself by dying for having been 'discovered'. and defies by its death the science that wants to take hold of it.
(Baudrillard 1983a: 13) The museological urge was clear in the excitement over the Tasaday who became
the simulation model for all conceivable Indians before elhnography ... fro
zen, cryogenized, sterilized, protected to death, they have become referential simulacra . and the science itself a pure simulation.
(1983a: IS) We also apply this cryogenic urge to ourselves, he suggests. For 'our entire linear and accumulative culture would collapse if we could not stOCkpile the past in plain view' (I983a: 19). There is a trend towards appropriating a homogenized and re-constituted past (or perhaps how the world might have been ?). If Bali does not loom large in contemporary Indonesian self-images, the reasons are interesting. Nehru not least claimed it as 'the morning of the world', what it (and presumably India) had been like when still young. And why scholars, museum curators and tourists armed with cameras descend on Bali in hordes is intriguing." Culture, suitably reified, has become a commodity to be owned.
Similar tendencies may be discerned in ethnographical accounts. Gellner, for instance, has charged Leach with hypostatizing the Kachin, as he assumes that change is explicable
by specifying the contradictory ideals that are operating-which can be done through 'static' models employing 'static' concepts-thereby simultaneously indicating the mechanism of change and describing a changing society by means of two unchanging models.
(1973 : 97) Behind this rests our old friend the Correspondence Theory of truth and meaning, according to which concepts somehow describe, or mirror, the world. As Geller points out, however, there is 'no such simple parallelism between concepts and things such as Leach seems to expect. ... The concept of "change", for instance, does not itself change yet it can "reflect" reality as much as the concept "stability'" (1973: 97). The difficulties stem from a kind of Idealism, the view that human action is ultimately explicable in terms of static, indeed frozen, cultural ideals (1973: 105-6), shared in different ways by Clifford Geertz and the Dutch structuralists.
This cryogenic proclivity of viewing other peoples as victims of history or of their own passive natures and so in need of help is, I suspect, mare widespread and complex a phenomenon than has been realized. It is one which the epistemological vision of humanity outlined above tacitly encourages in either of its two main forms. To view Mind as reflecting on the natural or social world through the ideally transparent medium of lan
guage is to overlook the problem of agency. Humans are construed in the image of their makers as passive observers and the instruments of, rather than participants in, transcendental agents from the Market, to History or Mind itself. Alternatively, to regard Mind as constructing or inventing the
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world, merely introduces Mind-{)r here middle-class American minds-as the central agent to the exclusion of those who do the acting and thinking.
It is a world without practice, where consciousness is aloof from the endless, and endlessly changing, mutual reworking of humans and culture.
Adopting or rejecting such an approach is not just a matter of scholarly indulgence which matters little to the 'real world'. Cryogeny underwrites, in different ways, the latest exercise in Imperial domination, the need to 'develop' others because, coming from static societies and unequipped with a Western dynamic individualism , they cannot do it for themselves. Now in itself it doesn't really matter a hoot if academics are wildly wrong in imagining how the world is: in SO far as it is not governed by the abstract ruminations of epistemologists, the world will carry on regardless. It matters very much, however, if our ideas affect other people, let alone how we set about changing them, whether the consequences are foreseen or not. For people in other societies adopt, or have imposed on them, ideas and prac
tices which implicate absurd, or even occasionally useful, theories which may come to be seen as legitimate and proper goals (see R. H. Taylor on 'the Burmese road to socialism', 1986; or Picard on tourism in Bali, 1986)."
If societies are not discrete entities, and their members passive pawns, but all related in a complex dialectic, might we then not learn something from others' usage?
Not yet
In the rest of this chapter I sketch out Balinese notions of action and agency and argue their bearing on an understanding of the self. These are sufficiently distinct as to vitiate the textualists' models among others and to give us reason to reflect on the adequacy of our own categories. The reason for concentrating on action is simply that Balinese often stress action in talking about human and trans-human affairs. First though, what kind of assumptions about knowledge, reality and agency would such an undertak
ing require? Instead of ethnographers and natives realizing a meeting of minds in some briefly achieved epistemological arcadia, it helps to regard knowledge and the self as culturally and historically situated. Language is not the means to represent a potentially transparent reality, be this meta
phorically portrayed as 'internal' or 'external', but it partly constitutes, and is itself reconstituted through, public usage. As Taylor has argued cogently, humans are not passive in this process.
Perceiving the world involves not just the reception of infonnation, but crucially also o ur own conceptual activity, and we can know for certain the framework of empirical reality, because we ourselves provide it.
(C. Taylor 1985b: 82) If social reality is not simply given but is something which is worked upon, so also 'the "mental" is not a primitive datum, but is rather something achieved' (l985b: 90). Reflective 'awareness in our action is something we come to achieve . In achieving this, we also transform our activity'
The A uthorited Balinese 321 (1985b : 84). Nor is action, and so consciousness, necessarily individual.
'All action is not in the last analysis of individuals; there are irreducibly collective actions' (1985b : 93). Taylor is implying here something close to Collingwood's notion of a 'complex agent' consisting of humans, not just as agents but also as instruments in more elaborate and changing forms of collaboration (1942: 141-42). Unlike such anthropological notions as corporate group or patron-elient ties however, which tend to imply some perduring essential entity or idea, such complex agents constantly rework, and even redefine, themselves (and are directly or indirectly subject to the activities of other agents) on particular occasions in particular cir
cumstances. So knowledge, including self-knowledge, is active, dialectical, cumulative and situated.
In this view, reality is not simply lumpen-matter. 'Appearance and reality, the subjective and objective, are at once both opposed (i.e. different) and also united.' For 'consciousness and knowledge are not simply static states, but rather active processes' in which 'knowledge is the process of the trans
formation of reality into thought' (Sayers 1985: IS, 16). This approach has several advantages. It avoids unnecessary essentialized dichotomies in favour of a logic of overlapping classes (Collingwood 1933: 26-53), as well as the epistemological traps which privilege academics as the closest thing we have ever come to pure understanding; and it opens the way to studying how agents in different cultural settings rework their knowledge and experience of, and so, the world in which they and others live.
The stereotype of the Balinese as sybaritically sating themselves on a surfeit of symbolism underplays the importance of agency. The drawbacks of ideal models come out in cosmological representations of Divinity. It is possible to extrapolate different versions. For example, Divinity is spoken of as Ida Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa. In Old Javanese usage, the language of much Balinese literature and philosophy, widhi connotes 'rule, law ordering, regulation' and the verb form 'to command, order'. WaSa is 'power, force, dominion' ; and widhiwaSa 'the power of fate or destiny' (Zoetmulder 1982: 2262-63, 2213-14). So Divinity appears at once as order, what orders, the power of order(s) or of fate . By ignoring the question of who makes such claims and in what situations, it is possible to regard priests and kings as immanently both the patients (in the sense of being the subjects or recipients of Divine ordinances) and the agents of order and orders to those under their command, rather as village patrons may appear as agents to their followers but as instruments to their superiors.
Another model of Divinity is at odds with this ordered vision. It empha
sizes the unstable competition popularly described as 'magic' (pangiwa, pangenen), 'witchcraft' (ngateyak , significantly Balinese use verb forms not abstract nouns) or 'mystical power' (kasaktian) where chance, contingency and fate are central. The world is portrayed as war, where potentially commensurable protagonists struggle perpetually, and over which Divinity, perhaps most commonly in its aspect as Siwa, presides by sheer superior ability. Finally, Divinity is also referred to as Ida Sang Hyang Sepi. As sepi is silence, stillness, absence, agency seems de-emphasized but, even in so idealized an account, the reading is probably ethnocentric because
